Can Anyone Hear Me?

On April 3, the day my cousin should have celebrated her fifty-fourth birthday, I woke to a video on social media of two human bodies catapulted into the sky above a dark plume of smoke created by the immense force of a U.S.-made missile launched by Israel. The bodies seem to hover in the air for a moment, high above the buildings, before they plummet back to the ground, landing in one of several areas destroyed that day by fire and shrapnel, including a school-turned-shelter where dozens of men, women, and children were killed. For the last twenty months, the Israeli military has dropped 2,000-pound bombs on displaced people taking shelter in homes, schools, hospitals and tents. The fact that novel and shocking modes of killing—and new images of the attendant horrors—are still possible speaks to the depths of Israel’s determination to inflict suffering and death upon the Palestinian people.

Three years ago, an Israeli sniper targeted and killed my cousin, Shireen Abu Akleh, a beloved Palestinian–U.S. citizen journalist, while she was working in full press gear in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. There has still been no accountability for Shireen’s murder. Since October 7, Israel has only accelerated its silencing of journalists—a predictable outcome, given the impunity afforded it—by ordering the closure of multiple news outlets, carrying out targeted assassinations on scores of journalists, imprisoning others, and refusing to allow foreign journalists into Gaza’s borders. For the most part, mainstream media in the Global North has either chosen to stay silent about these acts or has only reported on them as isolated incidents—all while misrepresenting the assault on Gaza as an “Israel-Hamas war.”

In reality, Israel’s campaign has been a cowardly aggression waged largely on Palestinian civilians via airstrike, snipers, abduction, and starvation. Multiple UN officers have referred to Gaza as a “graveyard for children”: in addition to the 10,000 children who have lost at least one limb and the 42,000 children who have been orphaned, some 20,000 children have been killed. In April, UNRWA reported that at least 100 had been killed or injured every day since Israeli strikes resumed on March 18, the date Israel broke a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. Investigating the 224 strikes that took place in the two weeks after that date, the United Nations Human Rights Office found that 36 of them killed only women and children.   

As if the thousands of people dismembered by bombs, sniped in the head and torso, and displaced time and again weren’t enough, Netanyahu’s government allowed no aid—no incoming food, water, medical supplies, sanitation materials, or fuel—to enter the strip from March 2 until May 21, when, under mounting international pressure at this state of affairs, Israel reluctantly authorized the entrance, but not distribution, of what Pascale Coissard of Doctors Without Borders called “a ridiculously inadequate amount of aid” to limited areas under extremely restricted conditions. Eschewing well-established organizations like the UN, which has operated in Gaza for decades and has extensive networks and capacity, the United States and Israel have backed a private organization called the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF) to oversee aid distribution. Run by U.S mercenaries and overseen by the Israeli military, the GHF has been accused by multiple human rights groups of being yet another tool facilitating the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. On May 27, the GHF’s first day in operation, Palestinian families seeking aid had to travel south to Rafah, where they were penned and caged in long lines and left waiting in the sun and heat for hours. When the crowd, desperate and starving, grew weary and stormed the aid distribution center, Israeli soldiers opened fire on them. On June 1, dozens of Palestinians were killed and hundreds more injured when the Israeli army shot at men waiting to get aid for their families at distribution points run by the GHF in Rafah and the Netzarim Corridor. Those injured in the attack said they were shot at “from all sides by drones, helicopters, boats, tanks and Israeli soldiers on the ground.” On June 3, the military opened fire on those waiting for aid again, killing at least 27 more people.

Weaponizing food deprivation has been Israeli policy for decades. As a senior advisor to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put it in 2006, the government’s aim, in strictly restricting the entrance of foodstuffs into Gaza, was to “put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Now, Israel seems to have committed fully to the latter goal, turning Gaza into a besieged enclave whose farms, bakeries, water desalination plants, wells, and food stores have all intentionally and systematically been bombed. According to the UN, more than 95 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land is now unusable. The same is true of homes, schools, and hospitals. Some 92 percent of residential areas have been destroyed. There is not one university left standing in the entire Strip, and every hospital has been either severely damaged or destroyed. Israeli forces have fastidiously and deliberately killed health care providers (1,400), civil defense workers (115), journalists (221), aid workers (300 UNRWA workers alone), educators, and artists—that is, anyone who sustains or enriches Palestinian life. Gazans are living in an enclosed killing field, forced to watch again and again as their loved ones are torn to pieces, set ablaze, or left crying for help under buildings turned into tombs of concrete and metal. 

We are drowning in numbers, suffocating under the weight of quantitative measures of our loss, our suffering, our destruction. The tolls outpace my ability to record them. For every statistic or figure I include there are many others, equally horrifying. For every small fragment of a person’s story or momentary glimpse into their loss there are infinite expanses of grief, massive voids left with no time to mourn them. Under the constant, multifaceted onslaught, the lives of the people in Gaza are meant to continue to shrink: they are to feel blessed to be able to bury loved ones with their bodies intact; to be able to live in the rubble of their own house, the footprint of their former life; to have moments without the constant torment of drones flying menacingly overhead, without the relentless violence of bombs exploding around them; and now, to merely have access to food or water.

This April, Israeli forces detained Ali al-Samoudi, the fifty-eight-year-old producer and journalist who, three years ago, was shot in the shoulder during the same attack that killed Shireen. In custody, he has been assaulted and denied medical care. Even though the Israeli military admitted it lacks “sufficient evidence” to hold al-Samoudi, it has extended his captivity for another six months. Under Israel’s system of administrative detention, he can be held without charge indefinitely—in a prison network well-known for its extensive deployment of psychological and physical torture, along with nearly 3,500 other Palestinians held under similar conditions.

Meanwhile, Israel continues its policy of barring foreign journalists from entering Gaza to report independently on the devastation it has wrought there. Press vans, press offices, press tents, and members of the press remain firmly in the military’s crosshairs, with hundreds of Palestinian media workers and their families killed over the last twenty months. Still, journalists in Gaza, for whom the word “brave” seems woefully inadequate, tell the stories of their people. For over 600 days, they have chronicled the unimaginable while being starved, displaced, hunted, targeted, and separated from their families. And they endure all this while covering the genocide against their families, friends, and colleagues amidst the rubble of their homes, schools, neighborhoods, and cities. 

On April 7, Israeli forces bombed a clearly labeled press tent outside Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, injuring nine and killing two instantly. Ahmed Mansour, a journalist for Palestine Today sitting at a table in the tent, was set on fire by the attack and died in the hospital the next day. According to one report, a piece of shrapnel had penetrated the back of his head, paralyzing him. In a video taken of the bombing, you can see him sitting upright, frozen in a sea of flames, the shouts and cries of his colleagues growing increasingly frantic.

Two weeks before, the Israeli military targeted another reporter, Mohammed Mansour, at his home in Khan Younis, killing him along with his wife and son. In videos taken shortly after his death, his father bends over his body and, through tears, begs him to “get up and talk! Tell people, tell them!,” attempting to put his son’s microphone in his lifeless hands so that he might hold it one last time. Within a few hours of Mansour’s death, Israeli forces targeted and killed Hossam Shabat, a beloved journalist in the northern Gaza Strip, in an airstrike in Beit Lahiya. I had followed Shabat closely on social media for almost seventeen months, watching him report through hunger and displacement, lost friends, family, and colleagues, threats to his life, and being shot three times. Shabat was twenty-one years old when he began covering the genocide, twenty-three when they killed him. In the early days of the January ceasefire, a short video circulated on Instagram showing him reuniting with his family after 492 days apart, embracing his mother, overcome with emotion. When I watched that video, I wept along with them, feeling their steadfastness, their sadness, their agony, and their relief at the ceasefire—although we all knew it was likely to be temporary. His family later said that the airstrike, which killed Hossam, his friend, and two men he was interviewing, blew his legs off. What is left of a world whose heroes suffer such agony?

While we reeled with shock and heartbreak, Israel alleged—as usual, with ample hubris and zero substantiation—that Shabat was a “terrorist.” Six months earlier, in October 2024, the Israeli government had placed six journalists in Gaza, including Shabat, on what some reports called a “hit list” and claimed they were members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad—an obvious threat meant to silence reporters, as well as a preemptive justification for targeting them. Both the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders condemned the baseless claims against the journalists.

On Christmas Day last year, five journalists were sitting in front of al-Awda Hospital when it was targeted by a missile. The wife of one of them, Ayman al-Jadi, was inside, about to give birth to their first child, while her husband and his four crewmembers waited eagerly outside. The Israeli rocket tore through their car—clearly marked “PRESS”—killing all five men. Al-Jadi was assassinated hours before he would have been able to hold his newborn son who, should he manage to survive this ongoing genocide, will now commemorate both his birthday and the anniversary of his father’s murder on the same day every year. At the same time, his mother will struggle to wrest joy out of a day of mourning, to celebrate life on a day marked with the weight of death.

For the most part, legacy U.S. media launders and legitimates Israel’s justifications for the killings—that is, when it is not outright ignoring them. When al-Jadi and his colleagues were murdered, the New York Times published an article on the incident with a subheading that reads, “The Israeli military said it had struck a vehicle containing a ‘terrorist cell’ in the Nuseirat area of Gaza.” It’s clear from the very first line—which states that the journalists worked “for a network associated with a Palestinian militant group”—how we’re meant to understand the killings: from the perspective of, and with deference to, a government that has been found to be plausibly committing a genocide by the International Court of Justice and led by an individual indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. The piece proceeds to quote an Israeli spokesperson calling the accusation the country is targeting journalists “fake,” and cites the “Hamas-run” media office as the source of the news of the reporters’ deaths. It is not until the seventh paragraph that the names of those killed are mentioned.

Publicly, Israeli officials dismissed the killings by calling the journalists “combat propagandists”—a variation on the statement made by Ran Kochav, an Israeli military spokesperson, on the day of Shireen’s murder. While reasserting the government’s initial lie that Shireen was killed by crossfire or by Palestinian fighters, Kochav described Shireen and her colleagues as being “armed with cameras, if you’ll permit me to say so.”

“Combat propagandists,” “armed with cameras,” “terrorist,” “Hamas.” These words, funneled straight from the mouths of government spokespeople into the pages of unquestioning news outlets, masquerade as complete arguments with foregone conclusions: all Palestinians are legitimate targets and all Israeli claims—despite troves of evidence to the contrary—are credible. Ultimately, all such justifications are just another way of saying there are no Palestinian civilians, no Palestinian lives worthy of protection—a position Israeli leaders also haven’t been afraid to lay out explicitly. “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible,” President Isaac Herzog said one week after October 7.  

The failure of the mainstream media to scrutinize the admissions that lay bare the purpose of the campaign against Gaza have made them increasingly culpable for the ongoing genocide. Almost a year ago, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, lamented that while “it may be just and moral” to starve Gaza’s two million residents, “no one in the world would let us.” What an incredible shame on us all that he was wrong on the latter point. 

Meanwhile, the killing continues. On April 16, the day after Fatima Hassouna, a twenty-five-year-old photojournalist and poet, was told that the documentary film profiling her would be shown at the Cannes Film Festival, Israel bombed her home, killing her and ten members of her family—including her pregnant sister and ten-year old brother. On May 6, two more journalists were killed in Gaza: Nour Abdo and Yahya Sobeih, who, five hours earlier, had joyfully celebrated the birth of his daughter. In the following week, Israel assassinated three other journalists, including Hassan Eslaih, a seasoned reporter recovering at Nasser Medical Complex from injuries sustained in the April attack that burned Ahmad Mansour alive. Israel deployed a drone-fired-missile into his room, killing him in his hospital bed. On May 18, the Israeli military targeted and killed five journalists within a twenty-four-hour period, in each case also killing their spouses and children.

In September 2023, the mayor of Gentilly, a small city on the outskirts of Paris, announced the town would be dedicating a square to Shireen. On October 6, just before leaving for France to attend the dedication ceremony, Shireen’s brother received notice that the event would be indefinitely postponed. The family was told there had been backlash and threats.   

The sting of the ceremony’s cancellation mirrored an earlier incident that foreshadowed what has largely consumed my thoughts for the past twenty months: the people of Gaza, and the children in particular. In 2012, the Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London hosted an exhibit called “Crossing Borders—A Festival of Plates.” The plates were decorated by Palestinian children who attended two UN schools in Gaza, and the exhibit displayed photographs of them to represent the collaborative art project between the schoolchildren and children receiving treatment at a community hospital school in Chelsea. As the school’s principal, Janette Steel, put it to The Guardian, the project was “a wonderful example of how art can bring children together to help them cope with challenges in life.” After more than ten years on display without incident, an entity called UK Lawyers for Israel asked in February 2023 that the exhibit be removed, saying it made Jewish patients feel “vulnerable, harassed and victimized.” Despite the fact that no actual patients had voiced concerns to the hospital, it was taken down within days.  

The reflexive silencing of Palestinian voices—university students, human rights activists, journalists, or traumatized young children with crayons—has increased rapidly and violently since October 7. Beyond targeting the mere content of speech, these efforts are meant to forestall even the acknowledgment of Palestinian life. Our mere identity as Palestinians is controversial, we are told; not even our children, not even our dead, can be celebrated or memorialized.

The suppression serves exactly the purpose it is meant to: there are now no expressions of Palestinian experience not subject to the threat of censure. Those complicit in the silencing, by shutting down exhibits, canceling speakers, revoking awards, condemning slogans, indefinitely postponing commemorations of slain journalists, or taking down the artwork of Palestinian children, give credence to the idea that Palestinians are only entitled to exist in a manner that does not cause discomfort for those who seek to erase us—that our identity must be contingent, always subsidiary to Israeli plans and preferences. The only acceptable way for Palestinians to speak is to account for the inconvenient fact that our existence thwarts Israeli ambitions, goals, or rights. The moments in which we acquiesce to this subsidiarity are referred to as normal and peaceful; the moments we resist it are condemned and met with genocidal force. And what affront justifies this vilification? That we continue to advocate for our right to live in freedom and dignity on our land, and that we refuse to die quietly and in obscurity in the meantime.

Of course, discursive acts of silencing work in tandem with the material quelling of Palestinian lives. Incidents like the cancellation of Shireen’s dedication are both a prerequisite and a symptom of the culture of dehumanization that led to her killing in the first place. For every example I mention there are hundreds of others, in hundreds of other workplaces, schools, museums, hospitals, churches, and community centers. And for every cancellation there are scores of murdered men, women, and children in the West Bank and Gaza.

A day after Israel broke the ceasefire in March, my phone exploded with videos that Palestinian journalists had risked their lives to post on social media: babies shaking, children with missing limbs, mothers crying over their dead husbands and children, a boy who lost his whole family in the bombings and has not stopped staring at the wall of the hospital in silence since he arrived there. That morning the New York Times published an article with the headline, “Israeli Ground Forces Seize Part of Gaza Corridor, Raising Pressure on Hamas.” The fact that “more than 400 people were killed” is only mentioned in passing in the second paragraph—and the death toll is followed by the now-standard qualification, “according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.” Like almost every article in the Times in the past nineteen months, October 7 is described as what “ignited” or “resulted in” the war. The message is clear: Palestinian deaths do not merit a headline, the number of Palestinians killed somehow lacks credibility, any acknowledgment of Palestinian lives must be accompanied by a rhetorical negation of their value, and history began on the day when Israelis lost their lives en masse. The preceding days, weeks, months and decades during which Palestinians were killed, displaced, and contained in open air prisons are irrelevant.

In these accounts, Palestinians die nameless deaths, become indistinguishable masses, are killed at the hands of no one, and therefore rise up for their freedom for no reason. The stories of the victims of Israeli state violence are either erased or viewed as irrelevant. We do not need to know that there are over 10,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons and detention facilities, many of whom are children. (Some 400 of those children are held indefinitely without charge.) We do not need to know that torture and sexual abuse of these prisoners is well-documented and pervasive, or that the practice of taking Palestinian bodies hostage is so common that when police attacked mourners at Shireen’s funeral, her niece’s greatest fear was that they would take her body. (Israelis hold hundreds of Palestinian corpses in what is referred to as the “Cemetery of Numbers.”) Nor is it considered relevant to discuss those political prisoners who are tried in military courts for crimes against an occupation that the International Court of Justice has found to be illegal in a political reality deemed to be apartheid by the myriad detailed reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and countless Palestinian and Israeli NGOs.

The inability of some to grasp the humanity of Palestinians is of little solace to the grieving young boy who sneaks out every night of the tent to which he has been displaced and walks to his mom’s makeshift grave of gravel and dirt to curl up in a ball and sleep next to her. It does not ebb the pain of the man who sifts, desperately, through the rubble for pieces of his children, his wife, his siblings, his parents. Or the people who grip their cold, still children, attempting to embrace them again. Nor does it diminish the wound to those of us who, in watching video after video of this destruction, hear them call their children’s names, using terms of endearment we grew up hearing from the mouths of our own parents: “my love,” “my life,” “my soul.”

There is no inoculating against desolation—no amount of loss that numbs you to more. If you are made a refugee once, the second or third times are not easier. Ongoing abuses and indignities are designed not only to separate the land from its people but to break the human spirit. Meanwhile the barrage of images of suffering Palestinians—displaced, in tents, made refugees, hungry, simultaneously forced to flee and immobilized—convey to observers the sense that this state is normal or comfortable to us. That somehow it is natural and therefore manageable. But that is a lie. Under such circumstances, to live in dignity is not possible; we can only endure with dignity.

Despite efforts to avoid it, I have seen the video of the final painful minutes of my cousin’s life countless times over the last two years. Her last steps and the images of her lying lifeless on the side of the road with bullets continuing to rain down around her as a young man risks his life to pull her body to safety. Time and again our deaths—so egregious in their violence and intention—are made a spectacle.

Like so many other words, the meaning of “privacy” for Palestinians has itself become blurred. What is privacy now that I have watched videos of a young boy carrying the bloody, dismembered parts of his little brother in a backpack, when I have watched fathers going out to get chocolate for their children and finding them dead when they return, when I have heard the cries of children asking to die themselves so they can be reunited with their murdered families?

And what is privacy now to those of us who have for the last twenty months watched people emerge from torture and imprisonment, emaciated and limping, men and boys digging with their bare hands through rubble to uncover soot-covered corpses, fathers holding up the headless bodies of their children imploring the surrounding cameras, “When will this stop?” What is too much of a revelation when you are only ever one click away from the painfully articulated bones of the spine and face of starving little children? When you see countless images of men and women holding their children’s small bodies, bodies meant to be soft and warm and to fold into the crevices of their parents’—instead now stiff, cold, unyielding?

A man clutches his young son, who lies still and motionless. The father’s hands and arms are covered with the boy’s blood. The boy’s small handprints in blood mark the neck and arm of his father. The man raises his son’s thin arm to wrap around his neck. Every time the boy’s arm falls, straight and rigid, the father places it back on his neck to try to hold him there, to reproduce an embrace—a last embrace. A woman carefully swaddles her unresponsive baby—blanket on top of white shroud—uncovering only the infant’s face, desperate to protect her child, to keep her warm and safe, to accomplish in death what she was unable to in life. With these images, privacy recedes against the drive to document our experiences and demand recognition for our lives in a world that muzzles us again and again.

The Israeli army attacks the bodies, spirits, and souls of Palestinians anywhere it can reach them, with every cruelty, every deprivation, every abuse imaginable. How do we tell stories of that assault that do not feel exploitative, violative, or violent when nearly everything done to us exploits, violates, and does violence?

The recent documentary Who Killed Shireen?, an investigative film produced by Zeteo, sheds light on the culture that led to Shireen’s death. After her murder, the film reveals, the alleged shooter, a member of the “elite” Duvdevan army unit, was promoted and moved to a different division in order to insulate him from inquiry. When that soldier, participating in yet another military raid in Jenin, was killed in June 2024, the other soldiers in his unit, angry about his reputation being tarnished for killing Shireen, began using pictures of her at target practice. In an interview, the soldier who was with the gunman at the time of Shireen’s killing says that no one was particularly disturbed by the incident. The killer, he says, “wasn’t like eat[en] up on the inside or anything.”   

And why would he be? The Israeli military’s deeply ingrained beliefs that make Palestinians targets, that lead to the unapologetic killing of civilians and journalists, enable ethnic cleansing and ultimately genocide. This is the same military whose soldiers use images of themselves committing war crimes as marriage proposals and gender reveals (putting blue or pink powder in with the bombs so when they blow up a row of houses the color rises with the smoke), decorate the front of their tanks with children’s dust-covered stuffed animals they’ve collected from bombed homes, and take mocking pictures in the lingerie and wedding dresses of displaced Palestinian women.

Increasingly, it reflects a nation that has overwhelmingly backed a genocidal campaign, too. Civilians have built watch decks and conducted boat tours so they can bring their families to observe Gaza being bombed, supported the denial of aid—in some cases by standing at the border to physically block the entry of food, water, and medicine—and have only grown firmer in their belief that the people on whose land they live should be eradicated. A majority of Israeli society retains its enthusiasm for the campaign: according to a recent poll cited by Ha’aretz, 82 percent support the forced expulsion of the Palestinians in Gaza, while less than 9 percent of men under the age of forty opposed exterminating or expelling them.

While Israel innovates mechanisms of destruction, psychological and physical torment, and surveillance, Palestinians learn the taxonomy of Israel’s weapons on the bodies of their loved ones, on the burns and incisions and missing limbs of their neighbors, on their own fragmented, dismembered body parts. I’ve watched Palestinian fathers and mothers try to find the exact words to describe whether their child’s limbs were sliced off cleanly or covered in deep shrapnel wounds, whether they were charred, whether they suffered from intentional kill shots to their heads or torso, or whether they looked like sleeping angels—their insides imploded by a thermobaric explosion. I’ve seen a video of Palestinian children being interviewed about the types of military assault they were subjected to: drone, missiles, tank fire, sniper shots. Some are so small they are not yet able to speak in complete sentences, and others haven’t been able to go to school for a year and a half—but all can replicate the sounds of the weapons perfectly, an intimate index of the mechanisms of death. 

In an interview he gave shortly before his killing, Hossam Shabat said he was no longer afraid of death, given how the Palestinians in Gaza had been forced to live alongside it in such abundance for so long. Still, the people invent ways to live and find rays of light amid the gray of rubble and broken stones and ash. Just as places intended to heal, nurture, and thrive are transformed by Israeli forces for death making, destruction, and revenge, so too Palestinians find ways to repurpose them for community, survival, and prayer: planting seeds in the rubble and battered soil, painting in vibrant colors on the crumbled houses turned to scattered puzzle pieces of stone and cement, sharing bread with neighbors when that is all there is to eat, turning the constant and tormenting sound of drones into a set of notes for an impromptu singing lesson.

No number of repressive laws, no amount of propaganda can convince us that our freedom is somehow implicated in the destruction of others. No attempts to silence our words, our pictures, our histories, our voices, our chants, our lives, will change the fact that we are Palestinian and we remain. Here we are in our press vests, to bear witness to our lives, not just to the atrocities committed against us. Here we are doctors who refuse to leave their patients’ side, health care providers who insist on remaining to heal despite the wreckage and danger. Here we are workers who distribute aid and food for as many people as possible, targeted for our role in sustaining life. Here we are little, with our pigtails. Here we are small hands, small torsos shaking uncontrollably, baby toes kissed that morning, lovingly combed curls. Here we are mothers driven insane or broken holding onto shrouds full of everything that matters that is gone now, fathers with bloody hands digging through concrete and rebar, calling out again and again and again with increasing desperation, crouching down to cry into the ash and darkness that echoes into the endless sky: Is anyone here? Is anyone alive? Can anyone hear me?

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